Here's another....file I/O difficulties.

[Zack]

.....
I wonder how easy it is to crack XOR encryption. I used to send my encrypted files to a buddy of mine and he'd always be able to crack them.

Why don't you send your friend a copy of a file encrypted by the enhanced Winer algorithm? Let's see if he can crack it. My guess is that you could probably give him the encryption password, and lacking the algorithm, he still wouldn't derive the unencrypted text.

I just remembered an old encryption trick that I used back in the 1970's. I had one or more dummy characters within the password, for the remote possibility that someone got a hold of the password. The algorithm knew which character(s) were dummy and just ignored them, both for encryption and decryption obviously. Easy to implement and could cause a hacker lots of headaches. I used this for a banking communications application and never had a problem.
*****

I would, but the guy I used to send it to is really busy - actually, you probably know him, he hangs around here. I knew him as Neo, but me may have changed his name.
But how does one go about cracking a regulare one-character XOR cipher? I suppose it's a bit like doing "Cryptograms", but what about executable files? It's gotta be a nightmare cracking those.